Free Republic

A kaftan-clad Hillary Clinton took to the stage at the 2024 Tony Awards on Sunday night and lectured her New York audience on “how important it is to vote.” The failed former presidential candidate strolled out at the David H. Koch Theater at Lincoln Center for the Performing Art to deliver her message. She also highlighted the historical importance behind the musical Suffs, which she is credited as having co-produced, when she arrived onstage to introduce a musical number from the cast.

Hamilton star Denée Benton turned on Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) during Sunday night’s 2023 Tony Awards, basking in a shower of enthusiastic applause as she smeared him as a Ku Klux Klan grand wizard. Benton was center stage during the live broadcast on CBS and Paramount+ to present the Excellence in Theatre Education Award from Carnegie Mellon University (CMU). She used her remarks to note she is not only a CMU alum but also hails from from Florida, saying: "Earlier tonight, CMU and the Tony Awards presented the 2023 Excellence in Theatre Education Award. And while I am certain...

Cicely Tyson, the pioneering Honorary Oscar winner who starred in Sounder and The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman and earned five Emmy noms for her recurring role on How to Get Away with Murder, died today. She was 94. Her manager Larry Thompson confirmed the news by did not provide details of her death. “I have managed Miss Tyson’s career for over 40 years, and each year was a privilege and blessing,” Thompson said in a statement. “Cicely thought of her new memoir as a Christmas tree decorated with all the ornaments of her personal and professional life. Today she...

As protest and rallies against racial injustice and the killing of Black lives continue, there is a seismic shift happening in the country as the civic unrest is shining a blinding light on systemic racism against Black, Indigenous and People of Color (BIPOC) — and the world of theater is the latest to get that spotlight. An open letter addressed to “White American Theater” was published on Monday demanding change. The letter was filled with ugly truths that those who have worked in the theater industry have experienced for decades. Among the 300 BIPOCs who signed the letter were Lin-Manuel...

(CNN)In case you missed it, "Pose" star Billy Porter's Tony Awards ensemble was a direct nod to women's reproductive rights. He stepped out on the red carpet at Radio City Sunday night dressed in a red and pink suit with a train, intentionally designed to look like female reproductive organs, reports The Hollywood Reporter.

Texas Senate candidate Beto O’Rourke (D) on Monday apologized for writing a review of a Broadway musical in 1991 that detailed the actresses’ “phenomenally large breasts and tight buttocks.” Politico on Monday resurfaced the review O’Rourke wrote when he was 19 years old for the Columbia Daily Spectator, the university’s student newspaper. The review from the Oct. 10, 1991 edition of the paper was written under the byline Robert O’Rourke and offers a sharp critique of the musical “The Will Rogers Follies.” O’Rourke criticized the “perma-smile actresses whose only qualifications seem to be their phenomenally large breasts and tight buttocks.”...

Rob Reiner, a director and longtime advocate for liberal Democratic causes in Hollywood, ripped into Robert De Niro for his “F— Trump” outburst at last Sunday’s Tony Awards, calling the foul-mouthed speech counterproductive. “If you have any interest in trying to preserve the democracy, and put it in the hands of somebody who understands government, who isn’t self-dealing, who cares about this country and the people in this country, then you’re helping Trump,” Reiner said in an interview earlier this week on The Hill’s “Rising” TV show with co-hosts Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton. “You’re helping Trump by saying ‘F—...

Robert De Niro got a standing ovation at the Tony Awards for shouting “F— Trump” from the stage to the crowd at Radio City Music Hall. But viewers at home didn’t hear the expletive thanks to the 10-second delay CBS had on the live telecast and the quick reflexes of a CBS Program Practices executive monitoring the show back at the CBS Broadcast Center in New York. CBS confirmed that De Niro went off script in his remarks as he took the stage to introduce Bruce Springsteen’s performance on the Tony telecast. The CBS Program Practices executive monitoring the show...

Robert De Niro had a simple introduction to Bruce Springsteen’s Tony performance. “I just want to say one thing — F— Trump,” De Niro said. “It’s no longer down with Trump. It’s f— Trump.” More to come…

“Hamilton,” an improbable hip-hop musical about America’s first Treasury secretary, completed its rapturous march across America’s awards landscape on Sunday, picking up Broadway’s highest honor: the Tony Award for best new musical. The prize capped an amazing season for the show, a smash hit that has been sold out from the start, captivating audiences and the broader culture through its use of today’s sounds and a largely nonwhite cast to explore America’s revolutionary origins and their contemporary relevance.

Tonight at the Tony Awards, the Hamilton cast will not be using their prop firearms when they take to the stage, according to a new report. The cast have consciously decided not to use the musket props during their highly-anticipated performance following the tragic mass shooting at a gay nightclub in Orlando in the early hours of Sunday morning that left 50 people dead."Our thoughts are with the families and friends of those affected. The Tony Awards dedicate tonight's ceremony to them."

The profane and hysterical "The Book of Mormon" took home nine Tony Awards on Sunday including the prize for best musical, a considerable achievement for a pair of first-time Broadway playwrights known more for their raunchy cartoons featuring potty-mouthed kids. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, creators of the Emmy Award-winning "South Park," found a kindred soul in Robert Lopez, who co-wrote the Tony-winning "Avenue Q," and all three found themselves with plenty of awards when they collaborated to gently mock Mormons and send-up Broadway itself. Collecting the best musical prize, a subdued Parker, who tied Josh Logan of "South Pacific"...

UNLESS I acquire some unexpected clout around here in the next 48 hours, Times readers will wake up on Tuesday morning to read a prominent story announcing the nominees for an artistically meaningless, blatantly commercial, shamefully exclusionary and culturally corrosive award competition. Let me put it another way: unless Times editors have overcome several decades of their own inertia, readers on Tuesday will find a prominent story serving the pecuniary interests of three privately controlled companies whose principals have earned the right to convene in what Damon Runyon once called "the laughing room." That was Runyon's term for the sound-proofed...

For those who enjoy televised awards programs, the Tony Awards show was once an event of the television season, part of a quartet. The Oscars celebrated movies; the Grammys, music; the Emmys, TV; and the Tonys, theater. Those days are now gone.Today we're awash in entertainment narcissism, with an endless stream of awards shows blanketing both broadcast and cable TV. Starting with the American Music Awards and the People's Choice Awards in the 1970s, it's proliferated into the Screen Actors Guild Awards, the Billboard Music Awards, the Teen Choice Awards, the Nickelodeon Kids' Choice Awards, salutes to anyone who ever...

<p>June 3, 2002 -- A furious Elaine Stritch told CBS to "go f - - -" itself last night after the network cut to a commercial midway through her Tony acceptance speech.</p> <p>The 76-year-old Broadway star - who won a special Tony for her hugely acclaimed one-woman show, "Elaine Stritch, At Liberty" - was thanking her producers when the orchestra started playing over her speech, a not-very-subtle signal that she had exceeded her two-minute time limit.</p>